SS-50 Bus and Smoke Signal Broadcasting
Charles Richmond
I remembering seing ads for Smoke Signal Broadcasting in Byte and other
computer magazines back in the late '70's. What became of this company? Can
anyone post detail about them and their products?
--
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Charles and Francis Richmond <rich...@plano.net> |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
Brian Evans
Charles Richmond wrote:
>
> I remembering seing ads for Smoke Signal Broadcasting in Byte and other
> computer magazines back in the late '70's. What became of this company? Can
> anyone post detail about them and their products?
>
your best bet is to either dig through some recent april issues or
wait until this coming april to hunt them down.
Brian
William...@nashville.com
Smoke Signal Broadcasting did advertise a 68000 or 68008 (don't recall
which) system that ran Alcyon's Regulus operating system. Regulus was
a unixoid operating system. Alcyon also supplied the C compiler shipped
with CP/M-68K.
Net-Tamer V 1.09.2 - Registered
DoN. Nichols
In article <34385D...@sympatico.ca>,
I presume that this was meant as a joke, assuming that the name of
the company was also a joke. As you will see in another branch of this
thread, it was far from a joke, and they produced very usable products.
I'll grant you that the name does *sound* like a joke, which may
have hurt it in the battle with the other makers when the Big Bad Blue
started tromping around in the microcomputer stream.
Their sense of humor was also evidenced in the manual for one of
their boards (a memory card, I think), which read in part aproximately:
Step 1: Open the box. (Since you are reading this, you have already
accomplished this part.)
It was a plesure to me to see a company which could still exhibit a sense of
humor.
Enjoy the memories,
DoN.
--
NOTE: spamblocking on against servers which harbor spammers.
Email: <dnic...@d-and-d.com> | Donald Nichols (DoN.)|Voice (703) 938-4564
My Concertina web page: | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---
Brian Evans
DoN. Nichols wrote:
>
> In article <34385D...@sympatico.ca>,
> Brian Evans <evans.co...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> >Charles Richmond wrote:
> >>
> >> I remembering seing ads for Smoke Signal Broadcasting in Byte and other
> >> computer magazines back in the late '70's. What became of this company? Can
> >> anyone post detail about them and their products?
> >>
> >They seem to only advertise in the april issues for some reason. So
> >your best bet is to either dig through some recent april issues or
> >wait until this coming april to hunt them down.
>
> I presume that this was meant as a joke, assuming that the name of
> the company was also a joke. As you will see in another branch of this
> thread, it was far from a joke, and they produced very usable products.
Yes I now realize it was a real company, but it did sound like some of
the april adds in Byte from years back. Those adds still make me laugh
when I look over old issues.
Brian Evans
Rick Hawkins
In article <61hakc$m...@windigo.d-and-d.com>,
DoN. Nichols <dnic...@d-and-d.com> wrote:
>
> I'll grant you that the name does *sound* like a joke, which may
>have hurt it in the battle with the other makers when the Big Bad Blue
>started tromping around in the microcomputer stream.
but not nearly so much so as "Kentucky Fried Computers." . . . THey
changed to something more recognizable; wasn't it Soutwest Technical
Products?
rick
--
R E HAWKINS
rhaw...@iastate.edu
These opinions will not be those of ISU until they pay my retainer.
J. Chris Hausler
Brian Evans <evans.co...@sympatico.ca> writes:
>Charles Richmond wrote:
>>
>> I remembering seing ads for Smoke Signal Broadcasting in Byte and other
>> computer magazines back in the late '70's. What became of this company? Can
>> anyone post detail about them and their products?
>>
>They seem to only advertise in the april issues for some reason. So
>your best bet is to either dig through some recent april issues or
>wait until this coming april to hunt them down.
SS-50 vendors providing complete systems, the others being SWTPC (of
course :-), Midwest Scientific Systems and GIMIX. Most of my stuff is
SWTPC with a little GIMIX thrown in for color. Somewhetre I do have
a hard copy listing of their monitir rom "Smartbug" and a couple of
years ago at a Ham flea market I saw an SWTPC box with a $2 price tag.
I couldn't resist, handed the guy the two dollars, picked up the
chassis and began to walk away when he called after me and said, "The
disks fo with it." So I know have a Smoke dual 5 inch diskette
system (the big black blox) with a couple of the controllers.
Eric Chomko
Bill_vo...@transarc.com wrote:
[...]
: (Southwest Technical Products Corporation) SS-50 bus. This was a
: pretty cool bus which competed with the S-100 bus in its day - the
: most interesting thing about it, to me, is the fact the the SWTPC
: motherboards had twin rows of 25 fairly thick pins, rather than a
Actually it is a 50 pin Molex connector (male) with a .156" spacing. The
cards were the female Molex connector.
: card-edge socket like S-100 machines. The SWTPC boards then had the
: sockets/connectors for these pins. A reasonable number of other
: companies, besides SWTPC and Smoke Signal Broadcasting, also made
: boards and other add-ons for SS-50 bus systems.
Helix, Gimix and Midsouth come to mind.
[...]
: Don Nichols adds/corrects:
[...]
memory trick
: of memory. The SWTP had an area of memory (I think that it was
: $D000-$D3FF, but it has been a long time, and I'm too lazy to
$8000-$801F was I/O, $8020-$803F was boot code, $8040-$805F was I/O and so
on through the $8000 memory page. It was a kludge at best!
: double-check) mapped for the I/O slots. Those slots only used part of
: the memory which they were mapped into, so the address decoding on the
: ROM was set up to map it into the spaces between the teeth of the comb
Thanks for the write up I save it away!
Eric
Frank McConnell
rhaw...@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins) writes:
> but not nearly so much so as "Kentucky Fried Computers." . . . THey
> changed to something more recognizable; wasn't it Soutwest Technical
> Products?
NorthStar.
-Frank McConnell
Frank McConnell
dnic...@d-and-d.com (DoN. Nichols) writes:
> Mine had several vendors mixed in, including some flash-in-the-pan
> ones which sold only bare circuit cards. (That's my spare 6809 system, built
> in the (very reworked) chassis from my SWTP 6800 I now regret the reworking,
> but who ever knew that it would become a "collectable"? :-)
Don't regret it. You were doing real things in the real times to do
them. Your machine has a life. If it doesn't have a life any more,
then it probably still has the potential, and it certainly has a story.
-Frank McConnell
DoN. Nichols
In article <61j9vk$3vb$1...@news.iastate.edu>,
Rick Hawkins <rhaw...@iastate.edu> wrote:
>In article <61hakc$m...@windigo.d-and-d.com>,
>DoN. Nichols <dnic...@d-and-d.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'll grant you that the name does *sound* like a joke, which may
>>have hurt it in the battle with the other makers when the Big Bad Blue
>>started tromping around in the microcomputer stream.
>
>changed to something more recognizable; wasn't it Soutwest Technical
>Products?
I remember the ads, but it wasn't SWTP. They were in business
before the 6800 computer making audio power amplifiers (and possibly other
things) as kits. The packaging was the same as the CPU box -- metal base
and front and back, with perfed black-anodized aluminum grille for the top
and sides.
It wasn't until the SWTP 6809, (which also had a fan) that they
started using solid covers.
Pity that they weren't using LEDs on the cards, so you could get
some benefit from the see-through covers to check on which boards were being
accessed. :-)
DoN. Nichols
In article <R-SCTFg....@delphi.com>,
J. Chris Hausler <jcha...@delphi.com> wrote:
[ ... ]
>You might try posting to comp.sys.m6809. IIRC Smoke was one of four
>SS-50 vendors providing complete systems, the others being SWTPC (of
>course :-), Midwest Scientific Systems and GIMIX. Most of my stuff is
>SWTPC with a little GIMIX thrown in for color.
Mine had several vendors mixed in, including some flash-in-the-pan
ones which sold only bare circuit cards. (That's my spare 6809 system, built
in the (very reworked) chassis from my SWTP 6800 I now regret the reworking,
but who ever knew that it would become a "collectable"? :-)
> Somewhetre I do have
>a hard copy listing of their monitir rom "Smartbug" and a couple of
>years ago at a Ham flea market I saw an SWTPC box with a $2 price tag.
>I couldn't resist, handed the guy the two dollars, picked up the
>chassis and began to walk away when he called after me and said, "The
>disks fo with it." So I know have a Smoke dual 5 inch diskette
>system (the big black blox) with a couple of the controllers.
*Nice* purchase. Was that the 6800 or 6809? Do you have the OS for
it? (DOS68 V?.? or DOS69)?
Enjoy,
DoN.
J. Chris Hausler
DoN. Nichols <dnic...@d-and-d.com> writes:
> Mine had several vendors mixed in, including some flash-in-the-pan
>ones which sold only bare circuit cards. (That's my spare 6809 system, built
>in the (very reworked) chassis from my SWTP 6800 I now regret the reworking,
>but who ever knew that it would become a "collectable"? :-)
have a local retailer who sold them. I was concerned about reliability
when I added floppies and based on other's horro stories decided
to invest in GIMIX 58 disk controllers. The only other board I
bought assembled was my first SWTPC 6809 card as that was the only way
and that is why I wanted the chassis from the flea market as I had
never bought one. Another vendor I did business with was AAA Chicago
Computer Center. They had a nice dual port serial card available
bare and I used a number of 16K 2114 based memory cards from some
third party (I'm on the road again and so can't check :-(
> *Nice* purchase. Was that the 6800 or 6809? Do you have the OS for
>it? (DOS68 V?.? or DOS69)?
that "father board" ;-) has some problem with it, it works for about a
minute after power up and then.... The processor is the MPA2 6800.
The interesting thing was a 32K dynamic ram card manufactured by, of all
people, Motorola. I had never know that Motorola had supported the
SS-50 bus themselves. Both the memory and the processor cards seem
to work fine. I've been trying to find documentation on the dynamic
ram card to see if it would also work in a 6809 chassis. I don't
know how the refresh works. I haven't done anything with the Smoke
diskette box or controller and probably won't.
Finally, in the previous note I had mentioned the vendor Midwest
Scientific Systems, its really Midwest Scientific Instruments.
regards,
J. Chris Hausler
DoN. Nichols
In article <p9Rhrj-....@delphi.com>,>DoN. Nichols <dnic...@d-and-d.com> writes:
[ ... ]
>I built just about everything from bare cards and was fortunate to
>have a local retailer who sold them. I was concerned about reliability
>when I added floppies and based on other's horro stories decided
>to invest in GIMIX 58 disk controllers. The only other board I
>bought assembled was my first SWTPC 6809 card as that was the only way
Hmm ... my 6809 CPU card came in kit form. Perhaps your local
dealer didn't want to sell the kits, because there was more of a mark-up
possible on the assembled ones.
>and that is why I wanted the chassis from the flea market as I had
>never bought one. Another vendor I did business with was AAA Chicago
>Computer Center. They had a nice dual port serial card available
>bare and I used a number of 16K 2114 based memory cards from some
>third party (I'm on the road again and so can't check :-(
My favorite one was a card holding a full 64k of static CMOS RAM
chips (which could also acept 2716 EPROMs with a jumper change for some (or
perhaps all) sockets.)
>> *Nice* purchase. Was that the 6800 or 6809? Do you have the OS for
>>it? (DOS68 V?.? or DOS69)?
>
>No, no disks were provided. The mother board in the chassis (or is
>that "father board" ;-) has some problem with it, it works for about a
>minute after power up and then....
Let me guess -- tin-plated bus connectors? Those tend to develop
problems after running for a while. The short-term cure it to move all the
cards up and down on their pins a few times. The next best is to find a
source for Cramlin contact spray and treat all the bus connectors. The
*best* was to get the gold-plated connector sets prior to assembling. That
cost too much when I got the kits (aside from having to order them from an
alternate source, and wait, and wait ... :-) And I didn't know about
Cramolin when I was using the systems regularly.
> The processor is the MPA2 6800.
>The interesting thing was a 32K dynamic ram card manufactured by, of all
>people, Motorola. I had never know that Motorola had supported the
>SS-50 bus themselves. Both the memory and the processor cards seem
>to work fine. I've been trying to find documentation on the dynamic
>ram card to see if it would also work in a 6809 chassis. I don't
>know how the refresh works.
Well ... the 6800 board didn't have anything special to support
dynamic RAM, so it had to be all on-board. It should work fine with the
6809, unless by some chance you're running a 68B09 (2MHz version), with the
CPU clock appropriately boosted. If so, there is a good chance that the
refresh won't have time to complete.
> I haven't done anything with the Smoke
>diskette box or controller and probably won't.
Pity!
>Finally, in the previous note I had mentioned the vendor Midwest
>Scientific Systems, its really Midwest Scientific Instruments.
Ah -- good -- I was refraining from commenting on that particualr
post.
Good Luck,
DoN. Nichols
In article <61m6cp$a...@nnrp2.farm.idt.net>,
Eric Chomko <cho...@IDT.NET> wrote:
>Bill_vo...@transarc.com wrote:
>[...]
>: (Southwest Technical Products Corporation) SS-50 bus. This was a
>: pretty cool bus which competed with the S-100 bus in its day - the
>: most interesting thing about it, to me, is the fact the the SWTPC
>: motherboards had twin rows of 25 fairly thick pins, rather than a
>
>Actually it is a 50 pin Molex connector (male) with a .156" spacing. The
>cards were the female Molex connector.
Well ... all that I saw were built up from 10-pin sections. And
there was one pin left out (and blanked in the socket on the card edge) to
serve as keying. That probably gave the impression of two 25-pin
connectors, though it wasn't dead center (not possible with 50 pins, but
wouldn't have been anyway, because it would then have allowed inserting
boards backwards. :-)
[ ... ]
>memory trick
>: of memory. The SWTP had an area of memory (I think that it was
>: $D000-$D3FF, but it has been a long time, and I'm too lazy to
>
>$8000-$801F was I/O, $8020-$803F was boot code, $8040-$805F was I/O and so
>on through the $8000 memory page. It was a kludge at best!
A kluge, but one made necessary by the poor design of the address
decoding on the I/O slots for the system. (Well ... not *absoulutely*
necessary, but a nice touch to avoid chewing up any of the useful memory
areas.
Enjoy,
Brian Kantor
>In most cases, boot problems could be solved by cleaning the contacts on
>a card whose blinkenlight didn't light up at the right time, reseating the
>card, then rebooting. Only after trying that would we worry about doing
>verbose fsck's.
Admittedly it's been about more than 5 years since we shipped our 3B15
off to the recyclers so my memory could be playing tricks, but wasn't
it the case that all the little red lights came ON at reset time, and
one by one they went OFF as the card passed diagnostics? That would
mean that the cards that were still lit were bad, which make more sense
to me.
Of course, there were also card activity lights, so maybe I'm confused
about which you meant.
- Brian
Carl Kreider
In article <61pfj2$s...@windigo.d-and-d.com>,
dnic...@d-and-d.com (DoN. Nichols) writes:
> In article <p9Rhrj-....@delphi.com>,
> J. Chris Hausler <jcha...@delphi.com> wrote:
>>DoN. Nichols <dnic...@d-and-d.com> writes:
>
> [ ... ]
>
>>
>>that "father board" ;-) has some problem with it, it works for about a
>>minute after power up and then....
>
> Let me guess -- tin-plated bus connectors? Those tend to develop
> problems after running for a while. The short-term cure it to move all the
> cards up and down on their pins a few times. The next best is to find a
> source for Cramlin contact spray and treat all the bus connectors. The
> *best* was to get the gold-plated connector sets prior to assembling. That
> cost too much when I got the kits (aside from having to order them from an
> alternate source, and wait, and wait ... :-) And I didn't know about
> Cramolin when I was using the systems regularly.
We used to use those Molex connectors in product in addition to our
SWTP/SSB/GMX/etc development system(s). I finally discovered that
the tin connectors were only rated for a few (less than 5 as I
recall) insertion cycles before the tin was worn away and copper
was exposed. This promplty oxidized and killed the connection. If
you looked at a pin with a microscope you could see it clearly. The
gold connectors had a much higher insertion cycle rating, but I think
only if lubricated. We used something like nygel. It kept the air
off the bare copper, fixing the old boards, and kept the new ones
from getting bad.
--
Carl Kreider
aka
ckre...@acm.org ckre...@qtm.net ckre...@gte.net ca...@syscon-intl.com
Carl Kreider
In article <61btkg$qc1$1...@usenet88.supernews.com>,
William...@nashville.com writes:
>
> Smoke Signal Broadcasting did advertise a 68000 or 68008 (don't recall
> which) system that ran Alcyon's Regulus operating system. Regulus was
> a unixoid operating system. Alcyon also supplied the C compiler shipped
> with CP/M-68K.
It was a 68008. I have on around here somewhere. I was disappointed
that it wasn't much faster than my 6809.
Brian Abernathy
Rick Hawkins (rhaw...@iastate.edu) wrote:
> In article <61hakc$m...@windigo.d-and-d.com>,
> DoN. Nichols <dnic...@d-and-d.com> wrote:
> >
> but not nearly so much so as "Kentucky Fried Computers." . . . THey
> changed to something more recognizable; wasn't it Soutwest Technical
> Products?
Nope, it wasn't SWTPC. They are in Texas, and were making hobbyist
kits long before the home computer came into being. I distinctly
remember buying one of their 'plastic tiger' amp kits years before I
bought my SWTPC 6800 kit, circa 1978.
Brian
DoN. Nichols
In article <61qupt$5c1$2...@gte1.gte.net>, Carl Kreider <ca...@gte.net> wrote:
>In article <61btkg$qc1$1...@usenet88.supernews.com>,
> William...@nashville.com writes:
>>
>> Smoke Signal Broadcasting did advertise a 68000 or 68008 (don't recall
>> which) system that ran Alcyon's Regulus operating system. Regulus was
>> a unixoid operating system. Alcyon also supplied the C compiler shipped
>> with CP/M-68K.
>
>It was a 68008. I have on around here somewhere. I was disappointed
>that it wasn't much faster than my 6809.
You could also run OS9-68k, which added groups to the file
ownership/permissions. They did this by splitting the 16-bit UID into two
8-bit numbers, the most significant for group, and the least for user I
believe. It worked out fairly well if you had never assigned UIDs above 255
under the 6809 version, however it made for some really wierd combinations
if you had. Since I tended to step UIDs up by 10, and assigned different
ones to different projects on the system, I would have suffered had I ported
to the 68k version. As it happened, about the time that I was being
strongly tempted, I stumbled across a 68000-based v7 unix box at a hamfest,
and put my efforts into running that, instead, including porting some of the
programs from the OS-9 Users Group library -- some of which had already been
ported from unix to OS-9 before. :-)
Ralph Wade Phillips
Hi, Rick!
Rick Hawkins <rhaw...@iastate.edu> wrote in article
<61j9vk$3vb$1...@news.iastate.edu>...
> In article <61hakc$m...@windigo.d-and-d.com>,
> DoN. Nichols <dnic...@d-and-d.com> wrote:
> >
> > I'll grant you that the name does *sound* like a joke, which may
> >have hurt it in the battle with the other makers when the Big Bad Blue
> >started tromping around in the microcomputer stream.
>
> but not nearly so much so as "Kentucky Fried Computers." . . . THey
> changed to something more recognizable; wasn't it Soutwest Technical
> Products?
Nyet. Try "NorthStar Computers" - which is what the store I worked at ran
on the whole time it was in operation!
RwP
Eric Chomko
Frank McConnell <f...@reanimators.org> wrote:
: dnic...@d-and-d.com (DoN. Nichols) writes:
: > Mine had several vendors mixed in, including some flash-in-the-pan
: > ones which sold only bare circuit cards. (That's my spare 6809 system, built
: > in the (very reworked) chassis from my SWTP 6800 I now regret the reworking,
: > but who ever knew that it would become a "collectable"? :-)
: Don't regret it. You were doing real things in the real times to do
: them. Your machine has a life. If it doesn't have a life any more,
: then it probably still has the potential, and it certainly has a story.
Some "hacks" on those old 6800 systems were universal. Doubling the clock
speed. Cut and jumper for adding SWTBUG rather than living with Mikbug.
Changing the 600 baud rate to 9600. It just made plain since to do those.
I think clean "hacks" will actually enhance the value of those old
systems.
Now I did see a hack on a memory card that added a chip glued down back to
the board with pins in the air, wires to the pins running everywhere! Now
that was a nasty hack. Looked like some insect being hooked up to
electrodes at first glance.
Hacks like that won't add value to a system despite any functional gain,
IMO.
Eric
: -Frank McConnell
Sam Yorko
And, don't forget, the original name of the company that brought you
CP/M was Intergalactic Digital Research.........
Eric Chomko
DoN. Nichols <dnic...@d-and-d.com> wrote:
[...]
: >but not nearly so much so as "Kentucky Fried Computers." . . .
THey
: >changed to something more recognizable; wasn't it Soutwest Technical
: >Products?
: I remember the ads, but it wasn't SWTP. They were in business
: before the 6800 computer making audio power amplifiers (and possibly other
: things) as kits. The packaging was the same as the CPU box -- metal base
: and front and back, with perfed black-anodized aluminum grille for the top
: and sides.
The Tiger Amp or pre-amp. I saw one once and it did use the same ext.
case. Where can I find some of that stuff? I have a SWTPC missing that
top. A buddy of mine is a sheet metal worker and I know he has a brake;
which will have no problem putting in the necessary 90 degree angles.
: It wasn't until the SWTP 6809, (which also had a fan) that they
: started using solid covers.
: Pity that they weren't using LEDs on the cards, so you could get
: some benefit from the see-through covers to check on which boards were being
: accessed. :-)
I think the pref holes were for ventilation and since the fan was added
for the 6809 perfs weren't needed.
Eric
Charlie Gibbs
In article <877079...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk>
uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk (Robert Billing) writes:
>In article <625vtu$r...@nnrp1.farm.idt.net> cho...@IDT.NET "Eric Chomko"
>writes:
>
>> Now I did see a hack on a memory card that added a chip glued down back to
>> the board with pins in the air, wires to the pins running everywhere! Now
>
> Only one? You've never developed any digital video cards then?
Heck, a friend of mine built a board using this technique exclusively.
He glued construction paper onto the board so that the chips would
stick better, and did point-to-point wiring between the pins.
He really enjoyed showing it to me. But then, he really enjoys
grossing me out any way he can...
--
cgi...@sky.bus.com (Charlie Gibbs)
Remove the first period after the "at" sign to reply.
anborg
> In article <625vtu$r...@nnrp1.farm.idt.net>,
> Eric Chomko <cho...@IDT.NET> wrote:
>
> >Now I did see a hack on a memory card that added a chip glued down back to
> >the board with pins in the air, wires to the pins running everywhere! Now
> >electrodes at first glance.
Hm.
I had always heard that described as, "dead bug construction". I also
heard of one company which had a game that they would play at company
functions. Whenever someone would shout, "Dead Bug", everyone would fall
off of their chair onto the floor. Last one to the floor lost.
Best regards,
Art Borg
Wim Lewis
In article <0000344D1...@mauve.demon.co.uk>,
Ian Stirling <0000344D1...@mauve.demon.co.uk> wrote
[re "dead bug" techniques]:
>Does anyone make eproms with the window on the bottom? ;)
Well, I suppose you could use a quartz board. Might be expensive though.
Does mica transmit a useful amount of UV? (Of course, it would be cheating
to just cut a hole in the substrate...)
On a similar note, I've seen circuits built (out of discretes) without
a board at all --- just solder the leads together, leaving the components
suspended in a sort of latticework in midair. I suppose this might be
useful for minimizing parasitic effects or something. It would be
tricky to do this with ICs.
--
Wim Lewis * wi...@hhhh.org * Seattle, WA, USA
PGP 0x27F772C1: 0C 0D 10 D5 FC 73 D1 35 26 46 42 9E DC 6E 0A 88
DoN. Nichols
In article <630dui$n...@dfw-ixnews5.ix.netcom.com>,
William H. Ivey <wi...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>In <wimlEI...@netcom.com> wi...@netcom.com (Wim Lewis) writes:
>>
>>On a similar note, I've seen circuits built (out of discretes) without
>>a board at all --- just solder the leads together, leaving the
>>components suspended in a sort of latticework in midair. I suppose
>>this might be useful for minimizing parasitic effects or something. It
>>would be tricky to do this with ICs.
>
>a computer built from IC's soldered to Radio Shack experimenter boards
>(which held one or two IC's, bringing the leads out to solder pads near
>the edges). The boards where connected, for the most part, with
>alligator clips. The picture was taken after the cat had knocked the
>whole thing off the table, leaving most of it hanging between the table
>top and the floor. Still worked, they said.-Wm
The cat cinches it -- even though there wre one of the experimentor
boards -- just free-hanging ICs with point-to-point wiring. It appeared in
*two* issues of Byte -- one inside, with a B&W photo, and later in a color
photo on the front cover.
And yes -- the computer was built purely from TTL -- including the
CPU -- and it still worked after the cat knocked it half off the workbench.
He was afraid to try to put it all back onto the bench, for fear that
something would get shorted in the process.
The computer was called "spider".
Enjoy,
DoN.